two prison escapees. They killed the deputies. Peralta showed up and killed the escapees.”
“I thought you were there?”
“I was. How do you know that?”
“Everyone seems to know,” he said. “That word on the street again. Do you really remember what happened there? Twenty years is a long time.”
“I remember it all.”
He nodded his head slightly. “What happened after the shooting?”
“It was a cop shooting,” I said. “Lots of paperwork, lots of Internal Affairs.” I felt like I was stuck in an essay test I hadn’t studied for. What the hell was he getting at? I knew if I pushed him too far, I’d end up with nothing.
“Why were those two deputies in Guadalupe?” he asked, his voice soft, contemplative.
“It was a traffic stop gone bad. That was obvious when Peralta and I rolled up.”
“Really?” he said. “Obvious. Well, eyewitnesses can be unreliable, can’t they? That’s why we need historians who can sift the evidence with more detachment. Quite an irony for you, Professor Mapstone.”
“Shit,” I said. “I give up, Bobby. If this is your help, it’s not much.”
“You give me too much credit,” he said, stroking his fine jawline. “I don’t know all the answers. Only some of the questions to ask. That ought to be enough.”
Lindsey popped the door handle and stepped out. But Bobby gently took my shoulder. “I know this much: You have the trusting nature of the reflective man, the man who wants to live the life of the mind.” He looked hard at me, his eyes empty of humanity. “Your department is not what it seems, Sheriff. Remember the Roman emperors who trusted the Praetorian Guard. Trusting will get you killed.”
Chapter Twenty
The Crown Plaza Hotel sat at Adams and Central, a big, tan box with half-moon windows, another homely remnant from Phoenix’s 1970s building boom. When the Hotel Adams sat on this block, it was a lovely Spanish Mediterranean landmark where the state legislature met informally in the coffee shop, and its awnings shaded Central Avenue from the summer heat. It was built after the first Hotel Adams burned in 1910, the most famous blaze of frontier Phoenix. When I was a little boy-this was 1964-I sat in a car with Grandmother and watched a bank robber chased down by the cops in the alley right beside the hotel. But by the early 1970s, the old Adams was a fleabag, its rooftop neon sign struggling in red letters to say HOT ADA S. It sounded like a whorehouse. The block had history.
Tonight it was so deserted it was as if everyone in the city had silently evacuated, that only Lindsey and I hadn’t gotten the word. Spending time in the hospital only added to the sense of oppressive isolation. The doctors were worried about Peralta’s lungs. It didn’t take a medical degree to know that being flat on your back with a machine doing your breathing was not exactly the way the human body was built to run. Tests showed the beginning of pneumonia in one lung. We sat with Sharon while three doctors gave her a grim catechism of the limitations they were up against with Peralta in a coma. She didn’t cry anymore. Her face had taken on the quality of a latex mask atop dangerous emotions. She didn’t need to know what I knew. I didn’t even know what I knew, if Bobby Hamid was to be believed.
After the hospital, we drove home, drank martinis with olives, and ate baked potatoes with cheese and salsa while we talked about the day. Lindsey wondered about Peralta and his father, how hard it must have been to measure up to a father of such accomplishment and yet such exacting expectations. I wondered about the Peralta stubbornness and fear of showing emotion, keeping both men apart for years I really wanted to go to bed and have her read to me; then I would read to her. But we locked up the house at 8:45, switched to the BMW-I needed to fill up at the 24-hour gas station down on Roosevelt-and drove slowly back downtown.
We drove around the block taking stock of our paranoia.
“I don’t want to be afraid to show my face,” I said. “I won’t do that.”
Lindsey scanned the empty sidewalk on Central. “Dave, somebody tried to kill you the other night. You just heard from Bobby Hamid that your life is in danger. Now we’re just going to walk into a creepy parking garage at night? And you haven’t been able to reach Kimbrough.”
It was true. I had tried Kimbrough’s cell phone twice since we left the hospital, just to be sure I got the message right about the meeting. But each time I was routed directly to voice mail.
“But what if he needs us?” I said. “He left the message and said it was important. I think the risk is manageable.”
“Manageable,” she said, her voice flat, assessing not really resisting.
“It’s a big hotel right in the middle of the city, video cameras, guards.” The light at Adams was red, so I turned in my seat to face her, took her hand. “Lindsey, if I just hide, the bad guys succeed. I didn’t want to take this job, but now I’ve got to do it. Whatever this thing is-they’ve tried to kill Peralta and now me-it thrives because nobody wanted to touch it, nobody wanted to go there.” She just looked at me, her eyes huge and nearly violet. The light turned and I added, “We can always flag down a couple of Phoenix cops on the bike patrol and ask them to escort us.”
She wrinkled her nose. “OK, you win.” She patted her backpack absently. It looked reassuringly bulky.
I rolled slowly around the block. The old art deco Valley Bank tower on Monroe was still vacant, an embarrassing eyesore for the umpteenth downtown revitalization attempt. A street person sat in the shadows of the dingy entrance, his shopping cart overflowing with black plastic bags, and dingy comforters. I thought again about Leo O’Keefe, about what Gutierrez said about being caught in the thresher.
At the parking garage entrance, I took a ticket and watched the yellow arm of the gate pop up obediently. A white-haired man watched us impassively from the parking attendant’s booth. The BMW climbed up the ramp into the bowels of the building, the engine noise echoing off the colorless prefab concrete walls. Then we leveled out in the long, low garage. The floor had been restriped so many times it was difficult to find the right way to go up. The ceiling was more concrete-too cramped to even allow a minivan beneath it. The decorative half-moon arches facing outside had long ago been fenced off with what looked like wooden pickets painted brown. And even though the streets were deserted, the garage was full of vehicles, parked tightly together, even bumper-to-bumper.
The sardine feeling let up a bit as we wound up to level four, which looked about half full. I scanned the space for any sign of life. Nothing. I swung around the length of the floor, patrolling slowly past empty cars. Then I pointed the BMW back in the direction of the down ramp, just to be safe.
The brightly lit area by the elevators was empty, too. I held my foot on the brake and rolled down the window, listening. The soft, precise timing of the BMW. A low moaning intake fan somewhere. A siren far away, fading. My mind slipped back to Peralta’s office, the man’s voice: “Did you find it?” What was “it”? Peralta had been looking at the evidence logged in after the Guadalupe shooting. Bobby Hamid had asked, “What happened after the shooting?” How was Jonathan Ledger, the world-famous sex therapist, involved with the girl who was arrested at that shooting?
“Dave.”
A pair of headlights swept across the concrete wall ahead of us, and then the businesslike grillwork of a white car appeared at the head of the ramp. It was a Ford Crown Victoria, like a hundred in the Sheriff’s Office or the Phoenix PD, the kind issued to detective captains like Kimbrough. But there was no handsome black man inside. These were two white guys, beefy-looking in the glare of the garage lights. They quickly pulled directly in front of us.
“Dave,” Lindsey said.
“Call 9-1-1,” I said.
“Trying,” she said, the cell phone in her hand.
“I don’t want to accidentally shoot some civilian who’s just asking for directions,” I said. But I pulled the Python out of its holster and slid it into the seat between my legs. I scanned the mirrors. The rest of the garage remained lifeless.
They just sat there, looking us over. Their hands were hidden. I studied them. They looked like cops, maybe. Something in the brow-authority? power? — with eyes accustomed to looking wherever they pleased. Thin lips and
